Committee members flagged several IT and records issues, including missing drawings, backup procedures, OneDrive adoption and potential chatbot services.

Speaker 2 reported that drawings had been deleted from shared drives and were being rescanned from paper. Speaker 3 explained the town’s backup approach and limitations: “We have a backup policy in place... It's backed up nightly, weekly, monthly, and it's backed up for a year.” The committee discussed how the timing of file disappearance complicated restoration and that rescanning was underway.

On file migration, Speaker 3 said only a few departments have completed migration to OneDrive and described staff reluctance driven by comfort with existing file structures. Speaker 1 proposed committee-led enablement and training and suggested setting a firm decommissioning target for on-premises file servers (examples discussed included 2027). Speaker 2 suggested low-cost resourcing such as a high-school intern program to assist with routine migration tasks.

Separately, the group discussed a public-facing chatbot offered by CivicPlus. Speaker 3 noted the chatbot is a separate paid add-on to the website: the committee can consider a level-1 public Q&A chatbot that uses publicly available pages, or a level-2 integrated chatbot that would require process and system integration and incur additional fees. No commitments to purchase a chatbot were made; staff said further analysis and alignment to data accessibility would be needed before pursuing the service.